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Monday Inspiration – writer Sarah Margaret Fuller

Since I’ve been highlighting my American-Victorian time travel romance, Thoroughly Modern Amanda, now available in print, I thought I’d talk about one of the women who inspired the creation of my thoroughly modern 19th century heroine, Amanda Montgomery. That 19th century writer is Sarah Margaret Fuller.

Margaret Fuller was born in 1810. Her father, wanting a son, was disappointed. Timothy Fuller was a member of Congress and Speaker of the Massachusetts House. Although he didn’t get a son, he educated his daughter the same as any young man of his class might receive.

By age fifteen, Margaret, the name she went by, studied reading, literature, philosophy, four languages, including German; she walked, sang and played the piano.

In 1830, her family moved to Cambridge where she met people in the Transcendentalist Movement. Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and W. H. Channing were among those she socialized with. She instantly impressed those around her.

Her father died in 1835, which forced Margaret to become a school teacher to support both herself and her family. She worked at Alcott’s progressive TempleSchool in Boston, then accepted a post in Providence, Rhode Island in 1837.

Margaret missed the intellectual circles she’d become a part of in Boston and saw teaching as a means to an end. She returned to Boston in 1838.

She published her translation of Eckerman’s Conversations With Goethe in the Last Years of His Life in May of 1839. She supported herself by holding “Converstations” for women on poetry, ethics, Greek mythology, as well as other subjects. She believed women were educated purely for display, but not to enable them to think for themselves.

Between May and September of 1843, Margaret, along with friends, toured the Midwest. When she returned to Boston, she wrote an account of her trip. In June 1844, it was published as Summer on the Lakes.

She sympathized with the Indians’ plight and betrayal by whites. And she worried about attempts to force eastern standards on them at the expense of losing their culture.

Summer on the Lakes helped Margaret gain recognition as a writer. And she caught the attention of Horace Greely. He hired her as a literary critic and general essayist for the New York Tribune. When she moved to New York she was working on her next book, “The Great Lawsuit”.

In answer to the woman question, she wrote: “…is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely, and unimpeded to unfold such powers as were given her when she left our common home.”

She wrote 250 reviews and essays for the Tribune during the year and a half she worked there. She wrote on such topics as women’s prisons, immigrant slums, city hospitals and social issues of capital punishment, the abolitionist movement, the war on Mexico and the treatment of madness.

She sailed for England in 1846 as one of the first American “foreign correspondents”. By 1847, she’d moved to Rome. She established a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli and they had a son, Angelo, in September of 1848. When Rome fell to French troops in 1849, they escaped and moved to Rieti, the Florence.

The following May, she and Ossoli set sail for America, but were caught in a storm. The ship was wrecked fifty yards off of Fire Island, within sight of New York City. Her son’s body and her manuscripts were never found.

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8 Responses

Thanks for sharing information on who helped inspire one of your characters. I love being able to see behind the scenes of a book. It helps me connect that much more with the characters and their story.

Thanks, Darla! All of my books and characters have their basis in the lives of real people. Each character is made of a composite, but I like to take a few things from a number of real life heroes and heroines. Make the story much more realistic.

Thanks for stopping, Nancy! It’s always good to learn what real-life women accomplished instead of going with a stereotype of people’s expectations of women of the past. Makes for interesting and engaging characters.

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Victorian Romance

About the Author

Susan Macatee writes American Civil War romance, some with a paranormal twist. From time travels to vampire tales, her stories are always full of love and adventure.

She’s spent many years as a Civil War civilian reenactor with the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment. She's a wife, mother of three grown sons, and has recently become a grandmother. She spends her free time inhaling books, watching baseball games and favorite old movies.